Work IT smart, not hard. How can organisations get more business value out of information technology without driving IT harder? Discussions on achieving this goal through better alignment between business strategies and IT, and in-depth understanding of trends in information technology.

Topics: Business strategy and the role of IT, Enterprise Architecture, Information Technology trends, Cool technologies.

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

EA Heuristic #6: Examine if the metrics are frequent and granular enough to be actionable

How can an organization recognize progress without appropriate metrics? Metrics are helpful in assessing if the organization is doing well or not, and if not, what areas can be improved. As such, it is useful to have at least one metric for each strategic objective. However, metrics can be too infrequent or too high level to be useful.

Granular enough?

Metrics that encompass several areas might leave one guessing which is the problematic area. In our exercise, some of the metrics are international rankings, which is a single number. Even though the ranking methodologies do describe areas assessed to create the ranking, we wonder if the rankings as metrics are granular enough to be actionable.

Frequent enough?

Once an area of improvement has been identified, metrics give feedback on the effectiveness of the corrective actions. However, if the feedback is given only once in a long period of time, it will lengthen the time needed by the entire improvement effort. In our exercise, some metrics were measured annually, so we questioned if they should be measured more frequently to allow for quick learning and refinements.

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About Me

I am an IT consultant with over ten years of experience in IT, including my recent stint as senior architect for Singapore's National Electronic Health Record project. I have worked on IT in a variety of settings, including research lab, startup, multi-national software company and government. I have been an IT enthusiast from young, and is passionate about seeing information technology make a deep impact in people's lives and organisations. Currently, I am a Systems Design and Management fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying how organisations can better leverage IT.